The 1990's decade has been marked by a societal technological revolution driven by the convergence of the data processing industry with the consumer electronics industry. Like all such revolutions, it unleashed a significant ripple effect of technological waves. The effect has in turn driven technologies which have been known and available but relatively quiescent over the years. A major one of these technologies is the internet-related distribution of documents, media and programs. The convergence of the electronic entertainment and consumer industries with data processing exponentially accelerated the demand for wide ranging communication distribution channels, and the World Wide Web or internet which had quietly existed for over a generation as a loose academic and government data distribution facility reached "critical mass" and commenced a period of phenomenal expansion. With this expansion, businesses and consumers have direct access to all matter of documents, media and computer programs.
In addition, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which had been the documentation language of the internet World Wide Web for years offered direct links between pages and other documentation on the Web and a variety of related data sources which were at first text and then evolved into media, i.e. "hypermedia". This even further exploded the use of the internet or World Wide Web. It was now possible for the Web browser or wanderer to spend literally hours going through document after document in often less than productive excursions through the Web. These excursions often strained the users' time and resources. In order for the internet to mature from its great expectations to solid commercial fruition, it will be necessary for the internet to greatly reduce its drain on time and related resources. A significant source of this drain is in the Web page, the basic document page of the Web.
In the case of Web pages, we do not have the situation of a relatively small group of professional designers working out the human factors; rather in the era of the Web, anyone and everyone can design a Web page. As a result, pages are frequently designed by developers without usability skills. Often the pages include elaborate image files which require relatively great amounts of time to download at the receiving station. In addition, there appears to be an increasing amount of advertising on the Web wherein the seeker of information at times has to be subject to "commercials" often in the time and resource taxing image formats.
The present invention provides a solution to this problem of downloaded bloated Web pages. The invention gives the user at the receiving workstation the power to drastically limit the incoming Web page information which would be time and resource consuming. The invention permits the user to operate in a "hotspots only" mode which permits the user to download and display only the hypertext hotspots or links which will link the user to other Web pages or data sources. This is particularly valuable to the user who has definite data sources which he is seeking or has previously wandered through pages and subsequently recalls certain sources which he deems to be of value. It is also helpful to a user who wishes to get an advance abstract of an area which he is considering exploring. By quickly going through several pages, he gets a capsule view which should help him to decide whether he is going up the right stream.